If this sounds like you, then you're a part of what's known as the "Winner's Circle" cluster. If not, then you probably fall into one of 61 other lifestyle clusters with names such as "Urban Gold Coast," "Pools & Patios," "God's Country," "Golden Ponds," and "Shotguns & Pickups." In The Clustered World, demographic detective Michael Weiss draws on the work of market research firm Claritas and its PRIZM cluster system to render a richly detailed view of the many neighborhoods and demographic segments that make up the United States. According to Weiss, the image of America as a melting pot is simply inaccurate--think salad bar, instead. He writes, "For a nation that's always valued community, this breakup of the mass market into balkanized population segments is as momentous as the collapse of Communism.... Today, the country's new motto should be E pluribus pluriba: 'Out of many, many.'"

In addition to explaining the cluster concept, Weiss shows how marketers can put clusters to work to understand consumers better and sell everything from college educations to Dodge Caravans. Weiss also looks beyond the U.S. population to lifestyle clusters in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, South Africa, and Spain. Marketers and social observers will find this pointillist view incredibly useful and perhaps a little disturbing. The overriding truth behind The Clustered World is that, like it or not, "You are like your neighbors." And in case you're wondering what cluster you belong to, Weiss includes the URL for the Claritas Web site (www.yawyl.claritas.com), where you can enter your ZIP code to find out more about you and your neighbors. --Harry C. Edwards

From The Industry Standard
Once, in the not-too-distant past, most Americans read Life magazine, watched the Ed Sullivan Show and drove cars made in Detroit.

Today, in a nation of 270 million people, 100 million households, 260,000 Census Block neighborhoods, hundreds of cable TV channels and millions of Web sites, mass culture is but a quaint memory. As author Michael J. Weiss observes: "When you say 'oil' in Rural Industria, a blue-collar Heartland cluster, residents think 'Quaker State.' In the family suburbs of Winner's Circle, the second most affluent lifestyle, they think 'extra virgin.'"

Rural Industria? Winner's Circle? That's the way the landscape looks when you gaze through Prizm, or the Potential Rating Index by ZIP Markets, a lifestyle-based segmentation system created by Arlington, Va.-based marketing research firm Claritas. Weiss, a fellow at the Columbia School of Journalism, continues his exploration of that landscape in The Clustered World, his third book on the topic of Prizm.

The book is part chronicle of American culture and part brochure for modern marketing-research companies, Claritas in particular. Overall, though, it gives a fascinating, and at times unsettling, glimpse of a nation divided as it enters the 21st century.

Formulated in the 1970s by sociologist-cum-marketer Jonathan Robbins, Prizm is based on the old folk wisdom that "birds of a feather flock together." Robbins took that simple idea and founded a new area of marketing research known as "geodemographics," which suggested that birds of a feather not only flock together, but also pursue similar lifestyles, buy similar products and consume similar media. Today, the notion of geographic segmentation has evolved into the "clustering systems" of Weiss' title, which are used to define people according to their every preference, from bowling alleys in Florida to social policies in Sweden.

Prizm classifies neighborhoods through dozens of surveys. U.S. census data is combined with demographics on new-car buyers from R.L. Polk, on TV viewing habits from A.C. Nielsen, on consumer buying patterns from Mediamark Research and Simmons Market Research Bureau, and more. (For fun, type in your ZIP code at www.yawyl.claritas.com.)

In 1988, when Weiss first wrote about segmentation in The Clustering of America, Prizm broke down the nation into 40 clusters. Since then, Prizm has split the populace further into 62 clusters in 15 major social groupings. The current clusters range from the wealthiest - the "Blue-Blood Estates" of communities like New York's Scarsdale, Maryland's Potomac and Illinois' Winnetka - to the nation's poorest - the "Southside Cities" in such towns as Opa-locka, Fla.; Greenville, Miss.; and Petersburg, Va.

Interesting, but not exactly the stuff of the New York Times' bestseller list. Still, Weiss manages to breathe life into the topic with numerous personal encounters. "All told, I logged nearly 80,000 miles and interviewed more than 400 people," he notes. "Local residents, politicians, shopkeepers, librarians, clergymen, even street people - anyone who could give voice to his or her cluster lifestyle."

Though he's clearly a fan of clusters (who else would define homelessness as a lifestyle?), Weiss maintains his distance. "As a journalist," he writes, "I saw the dual potential of the clusters: as a clever way to sell soap and an insightful guide to understanding how people live."

Weiss decides that the truth about clusters lies between the two, and the result is a chronicle of American life reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville, Studs Terkel and Charles Kuralt - with a little Idiot's Guide to Geodemographics thrown in.

In the second half of the book, Weiss provides details about each of the 62 American clusters. For instance, there are the "Country Squires," comprising 1 percent of American households. Country Squires rank fourth in socioeconomic status, range in age from 35 to 54, have an average income of $75,000 and a median home value of $230,300. Populating towns like Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Woodbury, Minn., they're moderately Republican and concerned about issues like tax reform and eliminating affirmative action. Their preferences include sailing, business trips by air, personal computers, Scotch, gourmet coffee, Saab 9000s, classical radio, Frasier, and Martha Stewart Living and Forbes magazines. They don't like country music, Mexican fast food, Mary Kay cosmetics or pagers.

Weiss' book also looks at the expansion of clustering techniques abroad. There are now Canadian clusters and European clusters. The international counterparts of Claritas' Prizm include Compusearch's Psyte in Canada and Eperian Micromarketing's Mosaic in Europe.

This raises an interesting question: Do New York's Blue-Blood Estates have more in common with their European counterparts - the "Clever Capitalists" - than they do with, say, the American "Rustic Elders" who may live just a mile away?

Yes, says former Eperian executive Emily Eelkema. "There are neighborhoods in Manhattan that are more similar to ones in Milan than in Brooklyn. The yuppie on the Upper East Side has more in common with a yuppie in Stockholm than with a downscale person in Brooklyn. Neighborhoods in Fargo, N.D., are very similar to Friesland in the Netherlands as well as Calabria in southern Italy. From a day-do-day perspective, their lifestyles, attitudes, motivations and products are all very similar. They're more provincial and concerned with family and friends."

Other questions come immediately to mind. Are businesses, like consumers, subject to clustering? Think about it. There's a film cluster in Hollywood, a wine cluster in Napa, Calif., a computer cluster in Silicon Valley and so on.

Might the Prizm system be applied to business clusters? More to the point, might it be applied to clusters in cyberspace? Eric Cohen, VP of CACI Marketing Systems, says it already is, pointing out that leading-edge Web sites already capture data from visitors and use it to suggest products via techniques like "collaborative filtering."

CACI has its own neighborhood segmentation system, called Acorn (try your ZIP code at www.demographics.caci.com/free/data.html), which classifies Americans into one of 42 groups. Another competitor is the Stanford Research Institute and its Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles System. VALS sorts respondents to its questionnaire into eight categories, such as "Achievers," "Believers" and "Strugglers."

Of course, the concept of putting humans into groups is nothing new. Though he didn't have a fancy acronym way back in 370 B.C., Hippocrates had a system for categorizing people according to temperaments and predispositions. The idea resurfaced in the theories of Freud and Jung, and Jung's "psychological types" were dusted off in the 1950s by Isabel Myers, whose ideas grew into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test that upward of a million people take each year.

Even people who never heard of market research can now be clustered posthumously. In their book, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, William Strauss and Neil Howe examine generations from the late 1400s to the present and suggest there is a repeating generational pattern through history.

Yankelovich Partners executives J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman proposed in their 1998 book, Rocking the Ages, that generation membership is the hidden force at work in consumer preferences and that generational ties link widely disparate individuals of varying educations, incomes and ages.

But amid all the pigeonholes there are lingering questions. Is the segmentation of business descriptive or causative? Isn't the very idea of segmentation an illusion in our era of growing homogenization? Prizm's increase from 40 to 62 clusters makes you wonder if America really is fracturing or whether modern marketing is simply getting better at slicing it up into pieces. Some have argued rather persuasively that modern marketers are better at producing new markets than meeting the needs of existing ones.

In 1997's Breaking Up America, Annenberg School professor Joseph Turow traced the mid-1970s shift in advertising toward target marketing. Since then, he says, marketers have promoted differences instead of similarities between consumers. Commercials tell us, "Better to stay with your own kind; it's less confusing and more fun." Said over and over, Turow notes, "the cumulative message might well be of a society so divided that it is impossible to know, or care about."

Of all people, Michael J. Weiss, champion of the market segment, offers hope that this is not the case in the final paragraph of his book.

"No matter how small the dot on the map, every community typically has someone who can explain how the area became what it is today," he writes. "You can call that person the block mayor, an old-timer, even just a busybody, but he or she knows who lived where and..."